The world of paintings by Anna Andrzhievskaya is a true treasure trove, full of mystical images, fleeting fantasies, and hidden meanings. The artist’s works open the doors into an extraordinary land of flowers and vegetation coming alive, extravagant creatures and mysterious omens. As if guided by a secret map, we traverse the surface of her canvases that engage us in strange stories, reminiscent of ritual dances, carnival scenes, tongue-in-cheek miracle plays. The remarkably rich imagery of her works immerses the viewer into the realms of fragile matter, suspended between dreaming and fantasising.

In Anna’s work, the symbols, when taken in isolation or in a network of meanings, are not random images fished out from the unconscious but, in fact, riddles of sophisticated design. The epic poetry of her work is woven from a variety of signs and symbols, borrowed from tarot cards, and books like Art Forms in Nature by Ernst Haeckel, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, Symbola et Emblemata, and others. Some are taken from the current reality; e.g., her works feature images of a barbeque grill, concrete high-rises, barricade tape, red piano, landline phone, or ice-cream bowl. Many of her canvases depict characters in keeping with the style of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch — anthropomorphised flowers and plants, fruit and vegetables. They all seem to have become alive and self-aware. The artist puts faces onto them in a straightforward, slightly naïve manner, quite like emojis expressing different emotional states.

The new project Heavenly Wasteland addresses the theme of direct encounter with oneself, face to face and with no hint of any self-deception or false illusions. Each character in these works is experiencing a catharsis brought on by a crisis of self-identity. This is undoubtedly painful since the reality can and is most likely to be far different from the comfortable identity imagined by our mind. It serves as a lifebuoy, or, according to the artist ‘this is like waking up at the wheel just before you careened off the road or collided with oncoming traffic'. Anna allows the viewer to experience their own personal catharsis but with some anaesthesia, with some fruit soda instead of a bitter pill, with a cute kids' band-aid to cover deep gaping wounds on the heart with.

Сurators: Polina Mogilina, Anastasia Lebedeva